Well, then you need something else to use as a basis for tenure decisions. Also, a "best 10%" conference/journal is valuable -- I have only so much time in the

Well, then you need something else to use as a basis for tenure decisions. Also, a "best 10%" conference/journal is valuable -- I have only so much time in the day. There are a few conferences for which it is always a good use of my time to read all the abstracts, plus one or two of the papers that seem most interesting. I can't do that for every conference, or even most conferences, in my area. So the "best 10%" conference/journal is valuable to the consumers, and the prestiege is valuable to the producers. Therefore I think such a thing would simply re-emerge if you somehow killed it.